Discrepancies in Analytics Software
I use 3 different programs to track my sites activity. All three, at any given moment, tell me different things. What’s the deal?
What I Currently Use
Awstats - This program resides on my server. It gives you TONS of information and I tend to rely on the reports from this software the most.
FireStats 1.2.1 - FireStats is a Word Press plug-in. I like to use it for a “quick look” when I’m on the WP dashboard.
Google Analytics - I think everyone with a website has heard of this. Put a bit of code on your page and you can view your stats via the web, anytime, anywhere.
What I’m Seeing
To this day in April, Awstats says I have received 3665 unique visitors and 131,067 total hits. Firestats says 4902 (this includes 1 week in March), it doesn’t have total hits data. The data from Google Analytics is not valid seeing I removed the tracking code for a while out of frustration. The biggest difference I am seeing is in the number of daily visitors reported. Last Friday this is what I saw: Awstats, 850 visitors; FireStats, 567; Google Analytics, 320. WTF?
I rely on Awstats most of the time because it does nice things like seperate bot visits from people visits, shows who came from where in GREAT detail. Awstats also show me what terms people used in search engines that brought them to my site. This is very useful if you use any target ad programs like Google Adwords.
What I am going to do
I’m going to ditch Google Analytics. It slows my pages’ loading time anyway. In the meantime I am also going to take a look at a few other analytics programs and see what they report (provided they are free). I think these discrepancies are worth a deeper look. I’ll report back next month and let you know what I find. I just want is something that is accurate. For now, seeing that Awstats resides on the server, I think I will stick with that.
What are your experiences with analytics software? Does anyone know what accounts for this wide range of data?
